The information and communication technologies (ICTs) have provided humans with a border-less and amorphous cyberspace where both empowered and dis-empowered on the basis of their knowledge, access, and innovation potential will be wrestling and co-operating with one another. New wars are being fought and new alliances formed with a semblance of new fervour and methods in the domains of academic research for development related policy options. E-marketing and e-commerce or a usual professional or personal chatting amongst members of different communities, civil society organisations and human rights activists have opened new vistas of communication and interaction. "In the virtual reality of electronic networking perhaps the 'E' stands for Everything," says Bilal Ahmed an economist based in .
The essential argument behind this article is that the ICTs have immense potential both to stage 'power shifts' and strengthen the 'dominance of powerful' with a simultaneous process of their diffusion and spread in societies.
On a negative note, the term of info-terrorism is already in vogue to the extent that it prompted US president Bill Clinton to count cyberspace as one of the potentially vulnerable areas against terrorism. His security plan, in fact, proposes US Congress to increase the amount from $280 million to $2.3 billion dedicated for computer security and research. While unveiling a comprehensive plan aimed at preventing potentially devastating computer attacks on America's critical infrastructure, he said: "We live in an age when one person sitting at one computer can come up with an idea, travel through cyberspace and take humanity to new heights."
"Yet someone can sit at the same computer, hack into a computer system and potentially paralyse a company, a city or a government." (DAWN / Loss Angeles Times January 9, 2000).
So far, so good. The above-mentioned problem permeates through accessibility options and expert knowledge of hackers regarding wired or unwired networking technologies.
The other side of the story
pertains to the content of knowledge and information that travels through
these networking technologies of cyberspace. This area is also not very
far away from the cyber light-fingered gentry. In this context, I would
like to go into some detail of the "knowledge-byte" (KB) that forms the
structure of digitised knowledge jostling through computer networks and
may be discriminatingly declared as empowering byte, dis-empowering or
a useless one.
The power of internet
with its immense potential to re-model institutional structures and, if
not far-fetched, the whole fabric of society has given a new shape
and dimension to the politics of knowledge.
The relevance of this aspect of knowledge-bytes to the development agendas of developing countries needs serious intellectual discourse. The buzzword of 'making ICTs and content relevant to communities' may necessitate scrutiny. It also has all the potential to strategize the meta-politics of knowledge in cyberspace on the part of communities and development initiatives. "The knowledge of knowledge gives power," as coined by Alvin Tofler, is a key point here.
Why should communities and others strategize for this politics of knowledge in cyberspace? Beside the traditional computer literacy, software development and its standardisation arguments, one needs to go further into the structured realities of digital divide and information haves and have-nots.
Owing to increased and accelerated digitisation of knowledge and information at the global level, the term referring to income inequality as haves and have-nots is fast protruding into cyberspace as a tool for power politics of information and knowledge. To me, in the context of the politics of knowledge it becomes all the more important for communities to collect, compile and while digitising their traditional knowledge make it accessible to and shared with the rest of the world.
The valuable traditional knowledge used to be handed over from one generation to another through oral and verbal communications only. When, even, if written, they were fundamentally circulated amongst a very small section of people and hence kept at distance from the global knowledge repository. They must be made accessible by the optimal use of ICTs.
Referring to this the optimal use, I would like to stress that the internetworking technologies provide, in a limited sense, an interface of television, VCR and radio etc. This aspect of cyberspace seems to add a very important dimension, where one is not exclusively dependent upon textual transmission of message. We can also potentially preserve and send verbal knowledge bytes in the form of widely accessible voice packets at much cheaper rates than the conventional telecommunication technologies. Perhaps future learning options in virtual societies have got to include the knowledge bytes of the so-called unknowledgeable and ignorant per se.
The use of internetworking technologies as part of strategy and medium in the politics of knowledge is validated because this is one of the ways by which the internal logic of development of any culture can be better communicated and practically applied for launching sustainable and equitable development initiatives. In this context, using the democratic potential of creative-anarchy available in cyberspace hitherto dis-empowered communities can better create strategic niche for their own knowledge and information systems than it was done in the era of paternalistic climate clouding the development vision of interventions.
The potential of development co-operation and alternative development paradigms is fundamentally enhanced by the cyberspace created by the new information and communication technologies. In this scenario the role of civil society becomes very crucial.
"In fact, the next century, which is going to be a century of the internet and global dialogue, the civil society will become more and more important. In fact, the internet played a key role in the mobilisation of activists against the Seattle meet," states Anil Agerwal, Director of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), India, while referring to WTO agenda and the Seattle episode in one of his recent articles, titled, Pressures on Civil Society.
The potential of ICTs should not, however, blur our vision for social development. There are certain caveat and limitations of ICTs.
It can, notwithstanding, be said that ICTs can cut both ways; they can alleviate and facilitate social disruptions simultaneously. It is widely believed that ICTs' diffusion and spread in society and professional institutions cause efficiency, reliability and good working conditions. It may also lead to incidence of ICTs as permissive factor for enabling environment for development. While, expansion of ICTs is in itself a manifestation of development. In this context, however, recent researches hold the first part as essentially contestable argument and the second is taken as an indicator for the development of tertiary sector of national economy i.e. services sector expansion through computer related hi-tech job creation.
The notion of permissive factor for institutional changes must be qualified to the argument that unless there is collateral change in the socio-economic conditions of society at large with integrated policy and planning at the macro level and improvement in governance the ICTs and their created cyberspace tend to lose their vitality. They are then unable to provide a platform for generating peace, pluralistic accommodation and conflict management. The same ICTs may, however, inflict social disruptions and lay a much stronger and unprecedented axe to the root of local and global peace.
The author is an information manager with the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP), Islamabad,
